Mr. Patrick Malley

Blogging in the Classroom

I decided this morning on my drive to work that it’s time I get my Introductory Psychology students blogging about stuff they learn in my class. The goal is to get them to think about psychology on their own terms.

Over the course of the next 15 week semester, they have to blog 10 times about something we discussed in class. There won’t be any prompts or specific assignments. I just want them to write about stuff that interests them in a space available for public viewing. As we move through the semester, and I learn more about their commitment to this project, I may tighten these rules.  However, since an underlying goal of the project is to encourage authentic exploration of interest, I want to keep things pretty open.

This morning, I asked students to create a free blog on Blogger.com. I briefly went over the signup process on the overhead in class, then we went down to the computer lab to set things up.

I now have an inbox full of emails from students with links to their blogs. I plan to follow them all via RSS, grading their participation and commenting when appropriate.

Now, I just need to create a grading rubric for their posts and see what happens.